The All-Hands
Most all-hands meetings transmit nothing and cost a great deal. The format is justified only when everyone needs to hear the same thing at the same…
Read →Idaho leadership
Leadership Lessons
Practical leadership lessons from experienced Idahoans across the state's industries, institutions, and communities — guidance you can apply in your own work.
Hostile Questions
Answer the legitimate question inside the hostile one and decline the frame it arrived in. Arguing with the premise is the trap, and the room is…
Read →Speaking Without Notes
Memorise the structure and the numbers; improvise everything else. A script produces recitation, and an audience can tell within about fifteen seconds.
Read →Presenting to a Board
A board is not an audience. It is a body with legal obligations, and it is assessing your judgment at least as closely as your proposal.
Read →The Briefing
The dominant professional speech form and almost nobody is taught it. A briefing is not a presentation; it exists to put a decision-maker in a position…
Read →The One-Page Memo
A six-part template with an annotated example. Roughly four hundred words, and it holds everything a reader needs in order to decide.
Read →Board Packets and Reports
A packet that reports only what went well produces a board that cannot govern and, when something surfaces, cannot defend the management that concealed it.
Read →Email as a Governance Instrument
Email is a record that outlives everyone on the thread and reaches audiences never contemplated. The discipline is not writing less; it is writing the same…
Read →Writing That Survives the Room
Write for the reader who was not there. Everything a document leaves implicit is supplied by shared context, and shared context is exactly what disappears first.
Read →The One-Page Discipline
The constraint is not about respecting the reader's time. It forces the writer to resolve what they actually think, and a page that will not close…
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